The Trump administration is expected to reverse federal limitations on short-term insurance, which does not have to comply with Affordable Care Act rules like preexisting condition protections. In their latest post for the Commonwealth Fund’s To the Point blog, CHIR’s Dania Palanker, Kevin Lucia, Sabrina Corlette, and Maanasa Kona examine how ten states currently regulate the short-term insurance market.
Idaho has just published rules for new, “state-based” health plans that are exempt from many of the Affordable Care Act protections for people with pre-existing conditions. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette examines the legality of Idaho’s action, as well as its potential impact on consumers and the health insurance marketplace.
The final 2019 Notice of Benefit and Payment Parameters has been submitted to the White House for review. The initial proposal included a number of changes to the Affordable Care Act’s essential health benefits, marketplace operations, and other consumer protections. In this final post in a series of blogs analyzing public comments on the proposed rules, CHIR’s Dania Palanker examines responses from Departments of Insurance and state-based marketplaces to better understand who the rule could impact.
Heading into open enrollment for 2018 marketplace coverage, experts predicted far fewer people would sign up for coverage. Despite the obstacles working against a successful open enrollment, sign-ups came close to last year’s tally: federally facilitated marketplaces (FFMs) logged 8.8 million plan selections, including close to 2.5 million new consumers, by the close of open enrollment on December 15th, nearing the 9.2 million plan selection from the previous year in just half the time. CHIR’s Olivia Hoppe and JoAnn Volk take a look at what explains the better-than-expected results.
Recent research highlights how health insurance coverage eases financial pressure on families’ budgets, particularly for low-income families. Karina Wagnerman from our sister center, the Center for Children & Families, highlights the findings from two key studies.
A reliable indicator of health insurance markets’ stability is insurer participation, including the number of insurers that elect to sell individual plans and whether they participate over subsequent years. In a recent analysis for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR experts looked at insurer participation in the state-based Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces from 2014 to 2018, which sheds light on how state marketplaces have maintained competition despite uncertainty about the law’s future.
Last year brought a lot of surprises in health care policy, and 2018 is shaping up to be more of the same. Here health insurance experts at CHIR, including Sabrina Corlette, Kevin Lucia, JoAnn Volk, Justin Giovannelli, and Dania Palanker share the policies and market trends that they’ll be watching in the year to come.
Blink and you may have missed it – open enrollment for HealthCare.gov was much shorter this year and ended on December 15th. But many people will have extra time to sign up if they’re in a plan that’s being discontinued. CHIR’s Sandy Ahn answers some frequently asked questions about consumers’ options if they’re in this circumstance.
The Trump Administration has proposed a number of changes to the Affordable Care Act’s essential health benefit standard, marketplace operations, and other consumer protections. In this first in a series of blog posts analyzing public comments on the proposed rules, CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette finds that insurance industry responses were not always what you’d expect.
New rules are due any day now in response to President Trump’s October 13, 2017 executive order to expand access to short-term limited-duration health plans that don’t have to comply with Affordable Care Act protections. The impact of the proposed new rules were debated at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ December meeting, as well as potential state policy options to protect consumers and stabilize their markets. CHIR recently outlined some in an issue brief, and we share some highlights here.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
